Picking up from yesterday's post, can we be sure of anything about the nature of any solution to the fractal organization problem? Let's try tackling this first in the static case, then in the dynamic case, then in the dynamic, time and space short with noise case.
This is a general solution to the co-evolving properties of Life - ever becoming more specialized in order to deal with life, and yet always having to communicate fast enough and be agile and able to move as one when external changes or dangers require it.
The specialization part is relatively easy and automatic, the re-integration part is where we all get stuck.
First, consider our physical bodies. We start with, effectively, the "stem cells" that are in the news lately, that can become anything. Then those specialize and specialize more and specialize more. Why doesn't our body fragment into a zillion pieces that refuse to talk to each other , like our societies are tending to do? I note in passing that even a slight tendency to fragment results in what we call a loss of overall system functioning, or "ill health" and requires reintegration, or "wholistic" recovery and reconnection.
Why is this such a big deal. It's such a big deal because of the wonderful property of relationships, a boon and a curse at the same time. Between any two things is a third thing, a relationship. I've posted on this before. At one end of the mathematical spectrum, the two things, like billiard balls, dominate and the relationship, occasion interactions, seem sort of tacked on. Some businesses and people have relationships about that level - occasional ships passing in the night, exchanging messages, then back to the cubicle for "parallel play" kind of work, as if no one else was there.
Usually, this is a very low-powered arrangement, because of the fact that each of the "objects" or "actors", the billiard balls, has a small and finite amount of energy and complexity. Not so for the relationship. Relationships, like the "angle" between two vectors in complex space, for the mathematically inclined, are unbounded. They can be arbitrarily complicated and hold arbitrarily large amounts of energy.
Mostly, we are continually surprised by this fact. We occasionally see a group of people rise above the billiard ball state to one where the interactional energy is storing a lot of energy, in "teamwork". And, as with sports teams like (sigh) the Michigan Wolverines, this dynamic "synergy" is a quicksilvery kind of thing that comes and goes and depends on "coaching" or something subtle. Subtle, yes, but powerful? Yes! The skill or thingie that can take a bunch of ragtag individuals and make them into "a team" is very highly praised, and very rare.
Going back to physics models, this interaction energy can be hundreds of times more powerful than the "self-energy", even for dumb things like atoms or large billiard balls like black holes. In fact, in the limit of that end of the continuum or spectrum, the interaction is everything and the self effectively vanishes. It's the mirror image of billiard balls as the stable thing and "interactions" as the occasional interruption -- it's a world where the interactions and relationships are the stable thing and the "objects" are occasional interruptions. (As if the Spirit occasionally takes an embodied form briefly, then it's over.)
That is the world that scientists believe exists in the super high energy worlds near the center of every galaxy, the disk shaped collection of ten trillion stars like the milky way.
What's the rule here? The design says that objects, or "self", is a very limited concept, but that relationships and interactions are where "The action" is, long term.
So, there is a fairly well developed mathematical machinery for understanding this kind of interaction, where the relationship or context itself becomes as important, then more important than the things having the relationship. For dumb atoms, the spectacular result is galactic centers of almost unimaginably high energies. At a planetary scale and larger, this is the field called "General Relativity" that Einstein studied.
But, we're humans, not atoms. We are, whatever it means, "alive". Our molecules and cells are dominated by this interaction energy field called "life", and when we "die" that goes away, and we are left with the heap of atoms, almost an afterthought, that was at the base of that interactional field. At that point, yes, we are "just a heap of molecules of water, carbon, oxygen, etc."
But when we are alive, we are something more. We live and breathe and operate in that space that soars far above the constraints of mere atoms. Our cells themselves are alive, already, so we are built up of relationships among living relationships, not relationships among molecules. And each of those relationships has a "life of its own", but we also have a potentially much larger "life together".
Coherence doesn't go from zero to one - it goes from zero to infinity. That's important to realize.
We're not facing the possibility of a 10% impact of "synergy" on top of our own small lives, we're facing a possible 100% or 1000% or more impact. Two people by themselves may be almost inert, or tending to "go out" as solitary coals from a fire do; but put together and interacting, may be huge. This is the key to sports team "teamwork". This is the key to why human relationships of just two people "in love" can be so amazingly powerful.
And, this is the key to The Toyota Way - at the core, it is a process for the organization members to stumble slowly, almost blindly, up the evolutionary scale in almost real time, discovering the huge power inherent in "working together". No manager can direct this result, no human can describe it well, but, together, collectively, over time, we can just keep on experimenting with a million tiny improvements and way-find our way up that invisible mountain to greatness.
But, Toyota took 50 years. We need to understand this well enough that we can make it all happen in 5 years, or 5 months. Is it possible that that is possible?
We can learn to control our brain-waves, our alpha rhythm, or the beating of our heart. Yoga masters can retreat into the mountains, shut out distractions, and master this in a few small decades. Or, we can connect to a biofeedback monitor and master it in ten minutes. As Tony Robbins, the performance improvement guru said when asked how long something takes, "How long do you want it to take?"
Now, there is something else about people that can be forgotten - something very surprising. We don't replicate by budding. We don't grow take one of our existing arms, say, and break it off like a salamander's tail or half an earthworm, and have both halves grow back into full people. We do something much more complicated -- we start over again at a single cell between each generation.
Why? That's a huge amount of work. There must be a huge reason.
One reason is genetic mixing and cross-over, yes. But the world is multi-valued, and just because we find one reason doesn't mean we found them all.
And, here's another puzzle. How can it be that each new generation's infants are so powerfully strong and dynamic and adaptive, when they are born to parents who are getting old and set in their ways and having parts already start to break? That's strange, isn't it? Where does this "new life" or "new youth and vitality" come from? (And can I buy some more of it?) It can't be packed inside the DNA, because by now we've unfolded that sucker a million times or more, many times per generation, and it would have run out.
No, the new youth and vitality and life comes from this "synergy" part -- the dynamic relationship among the parts that has to be rebuilt from the ground up every generation, and, astoundingly, is.
Well, maybe these two things are related - the pushing the entire thing through a keyhole the size of one cell, and the sudden burst of new vitality and energy that seems to come as a miracle from nowhere.
I think they are related. What our bodies have at that stage are millions, then billions of cells that very recently were all a single cell, and still remember, in some real way, that total unity of being. It's hard to get more unified than being one cell.
Then, as the parts specialize and specialize more, not hands and arms and legs and eyes, they start migrating into these secondary and tertiary silos, with a common heritage but no longer working on exactly the same problem, locally. We "get old" and set in our ways.
Well, good news, boys and girls. Toyota has proven that at least one organization can be "revitalized" or "vitalized" from the ground up. It doesn't have to just "go downhill."
We only need one case to prove it can happen and we have that case.
What are the secrets of the solution? Well, as I just discussed, "unity" is a big deal. The cells of our body have to be in constant awareness of their inherent similarity, of the fact that they all came down the same tree, from the same start, even though they chose different pathways to turn into from the stem-cell stage. For people to pull-off an organizational miracle of revitalization, they too probably have to get back in touch with the core "unity" that makes all humans "equal" in where we started in life - as single cells -- an further back than that.
That is one unity that surpasses all diversity, and we need to treasure every possible source of unity, because those are what hold together the chalice into which we want life to pour our new life and new youth. For Toyota, this involved a tremendous flattening of the organizational pyramid or hierarchy, and acceptance of the astounding idea that management and labor are the same kind of people. All kinds of prejudice and stereotypes about other groups being inherently and irrevocably "different" have to be let go of, and removed, for this to take off and soar without holding the brakes on.
"We are one" has to be made real in every way that we have control over, to open the door the the ways we don't have direct control over.
Then, our vitality can become unbounded again, we can regenerate lost parts, and we can rise up to arbitrarily high performance and ability to cope with and adapt to the world's challenges.
Well, in theory. Starting with, say, any large organization such as a tertiary medical center that has already differentiated into different branches and specialties and sub-specialities and sub-sub-specialties, each of which is internally convinced it is "superior" to all the others -- how does that work in practice? And doctors don't want to think of themselves as "the same as" a secretary or janitor, the think of themselves as "better than" such people. Then what?
Then we have what we have today. We get institutional level fragmentation, arthritis, inability to adapt, inability to cope, dysfunction on increasingly larger scales, and, if left unchecked, the inevitable and inexorable end point of all that fragmentation -- institutional old age and finally institutional death.
But that is not the end point of life, just the end point of a life style in which the power is all leaking out through barriers to change and stereotypes of expectations and prejudices of history or power that are holding onto constraints that need to be discarded.
What to do is not something that a few managers, or an outside consulting firm can come in and go, oh yes, change these reporting relationships and replace these people and you'll be fine. The change that's required is organic. Every part of the being of the beast has participate in being aware of the presence of the other parts, and accepting them as "equal", and letting the obvious ways of improving things happen, even if that changes long-standing cherished boundaries that used to help us make sense of life and keep it under control.
The boundaries that used to be the solution to control necessary for life to thrive and be prosperous have become the problems.
Our human organizations are held in place by norms and expectations, that can change in a heartbeat, but tend not to. Our expectations are prisoners to our beliefs and our prejudices based on what happened in the past. We are in a world recreated every day anew based on those prejudices and self-fulfilling expectations. It can change in a day, if we let go of our pre-conceived notions (prejudices) that are holding it back.
So, in theory this is possible. In a different scale of life we see this happen all the time. On corporate scales we have seen it happen at least once. In sports teams, we see it happen often enough to pay a lot of money to watch games for those few seconds of ecstasy when the team "gets it together" for a few moments of "momentum" and changes everything. All bets are off when that player takes the field.
But this still seems like luck or magic, some kind of art that happens rarely, but sadly will not happen to us. We say the incantations, arrange the magical items, but the rain doesn't fall. Why not? What are we doing wrong?
How can we make the more like building a bridge or skyscraper so it doesn't tend to fall down as soon as we're done?
We have trillions of examples, across all scales of life from viruses to nations, where this phenomenon has shown glimpses of itself. Again, we need to pool notes and reveal the phantom shape that keeps playing out around us.
That's what learning is about, on a social level - finding out what actually works with our eyes open, trading notes, realizing what might work just one tenth of one percent better and trying it to see if it does, over and over again.
And knowing we need to let go of the old shapes and old solutions that are the new problems. But not in a revolutionary way, which is chaotic and risky, but in an evolutionary way, stable and methodical and systematic. All changes have to be tiny, small enough that we can hit the "Undo" button if they don't work, or the "commit and accept" button if they do, times a zillion, persisted over time. That's all it takes. That, and time will do the trick.
Well, and enough belief in the process to be willing to devote the time and energy to overcoming despair and trying it. We keep looking for single-step solutions that have a huge impact, which is at the wrong end of the spectrum.
As the Institute of Medicine noted in Crossing the Quality Chasm -- we don't need a billion dollar solution -- we need a billion one-dollar solutions.
That's what the Toyota Way, or continuous improvement, or learning organizations are all about. Very small changes, so "control" is never lost, repeated over and over. We are not good at comprehending the power of a compounded change. We think it should "look" big.
It doesn't, not with our usual eyes. Amazingly small things can have an amazingly large impact, and we have been not looking for solutions of that nature.
If we rotate by half a degree a day, which is almost nothing, we will turn by 180 degrees, a complete U-turn, in a year. That's the sweet spot that combines unbroken control with unbounded upwards evolution and learning -- persistent motion, just above zero, in some direction or with some coherent generating process.
It's exactly the opposite of the end where contractors or vendors can charge big bucks, because the individual changes are so tiny, as well as completely unpredictable in advance. We can define the process, but not say much about the path, except that it will surprise us. And big budget programs want pathways spelled out in advance, and big changes to happen that are visible.
Big outcomes come from the other end as well, and only from it once the world becomes so entangled -- a billion $1 changes, not a $billion change, remember.
So, now the question has been rotated around yet again to what process, or ethic, or belief, or mechanism will hold together such a collective effort over a long time, with such "little" visible or tangible result in the short run?
Again, quoting Tony Robbins, "We over-estimate what we can do in a year; we underestimate what we can do in a decade."
And here we reach the point where science has to look to religion or culture for clues as to what gets people to pick a direction and stick with it over a long period of time, even with little immediate tangible outcome? "Faith" comes to mind, faith in a process, not blind faith, but faith based on the experience of other parts of the world that has been comprehended and understood. Eyes open faith based on evidence of what actually works in practice.
And, since this is a bootstrap feedback loop we're trying to get rolling, a tornado we're hoping to induce, the faith in the unity of mankind requires seeing the unity, which requires pooling notes across diversity, which we tend not to do since we already concluded it's not there. Those pre-judgments of despair have to be let go, suspended for a while, based on solid theory and maybe advanced computer simulations or something that can make vivid animations showing that this can and does work.
Our bodies work which requires this miracle to be possible in practice. Galactic centers work. This isn't magic, but it is math beyond our usual training and experience. We're used to the cold, dark rock, the billiard-ball end of the universe, even though our textbooks tell us that 99% of the universe is at the opposite end, in the "plasma" state of matter, or state of being, at the blinding light end of the spectrum.
We just need to resolve to move towards the light, a little bit more every day, with every person expected to pitch in and help a little, and no one expected to have "a plan" other than the Toyota type process of continual exploration and mutual assistance.
The Light is there, and we need to move, because the old ways just aren't working any more, but we can move slowly and methodically, without disruption or ripping or tearing the fabric of society, if we all move a tiny bit forward each day.
That's the Way.
No one can tell you what change you need to make at the levels you live in. Something can change, but no one really knows which way is up, given how much things interact and have surprising results. So we need to move very slowly so that news from the outlying districts has time to make it into town.
And, at least have of our tiny exploratory moves will be in the "wrong" direction, that is, we will be surprised that the result is the opposite of what we expected. That's cool. That's how it should be. We tried something, we learned something. That's success not failure. Tomorrow, reverse direction and take two steps. We end up way ahead of where we'd be if we just stood here dithering, or analyzing. We're in motion and found the right direction with a simple experiment.
Just like the eye guy does, switching lenses in and out. "Better HERE.... or HERE?" That's all we need to do, but everyone needs to do it, every day, for a long time.
And that's what the problem has now rotated into. What does it take to get everyone to participate in doing something that takes a long time and has very little positive feedback, although some, as it is unfolding?
If we crack that problem, we can get learning organizations that adapt, and if we get those, we can solve most of the rest of our problems.
And, as with any bootstrap feedback process, it won't start overnight. It will start small, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, pick up speed and steam at the same time. It will develop momentum and start to snowball once it gets rolling.
All the standard financial analysis garbage like Extended Value Added ("EVA") misdirect us to ignore solutions that don't solve the problem this quarter in one huge step. "Prioritize" or "let the government do it" are pushed as solution paths.
This is at the other end. Everyone does a little, not someone does a lot. Initially we see close to nothing, although it better be positive or we should reverse it, but the change picks up speed as it starts to make a noticeable dent in things.
To try it, we have to see it, or have trust -- and cynicism is pretty large these days, judging from the polls, so seeing is better. This is where science can help, by making some vivid animations of how this process can work that are persuasive to some critical mass of people to give it a try, eyes open, and see what happens.
No one's apple cart should be over-turned, since it only changes 0.1% of things at a time, slowly, and reversibly. It's safe. But it gets us out of here.
And, the amazing thing about constant-force processes, is that they pick up speed. As with rocket ships or jet aircraft, the power is proportional to the velocity. Runways for some of our most powerful jets are still two miles long, because at initial slow speeds they are lumbering beasts that make a lot of noise and don't seem to be getting up much speed. We need to hold that setting and wait a little -- and check that speed again.
Once it's actually airborne, it picks up speed faster and faster and we can pull the nose up and break the sound barrier in a vertical climb out. But we have to make it past that really, really slow starting of the roll-out.
That's what we need to figure out how to bring about.
A billion one-dollar solutions. It will work. It's how we got this far, and why your body is able to function and sit there reading this. But what will give us the persistence to try, that's the question to look at.
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